What codec should I edit in on Premiere Pro?

Question

I have a MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014) with base configuration. I have a bunch of footage off a Canon 700D which is in a H.264 codec. Now obviously, a MacBook Air does not have an external graphics card, which means that Premiere Pro does not support CUDA which supports faster encoding.

I don't have a plan of changing computers anytime soon, so I was wondering if I should transcode my footage to a different codec so that it encode faster? Is there like a ProRes for Premiere? I will be encoding into H.264 most of the time to upload to YouTube.

Any tips would be great. Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Premiere Pro supports the use of "proxies" that allow you to edit the video using low resolution files (and thus making edits very fast)

Once you finish, you export using the original file and thus the quality is what you expect.

It is impossible to explain proxies in a single answer. Search the official documentation or one of the many tutorials that exist on this topic.

Answer 2

H.264 (and the soon-to-be popularized H.265) is highly compressed which means your computer needs to work harder to work with it. ProRes, even though the files are larger, will allow for a smoother editing experience.

Answer 3

If by encoding, you simply mean the export process and not the preview performance on the timeline during edit, then it should hardly make a difference. If your computer can play the raw footage in real-time, then the decoding step isn't a limiting factor but applying the effects and encoding to output codec are.